MODUS OPERANDI OF SELLING.

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toes and arching insteps, and the man, a sharp-featured Hebrew, who was proprietor, seized me and thrust a second-hand pair of boots in my face, saying at the same time:

"You wan'sh a nish pair o' bootsh? S'help, I shells you thish pair for two shillings, and they wash never made lesh than a guinea and a half! Don't you want to buy these sphlendid bootsh; s'help me, I only makes'h two pensh?"

I tried to get away, but he held to my arm and kept shaking the boots, while his sharp, black eyes glittered like sword points at the prospect of losing a sale. At last the detective, losing patience, jerked him away, and we passed on to the next slop stand.

The Jew was all This old humbug of a

This was kept by an old Irish woman. mercantile acerbity and sharpness. female Celt was all treacle and honey.

"Ah, then, it's the foine gentleman that ye are. It's easy to see the good dhrop is in ye. May be it's a likin' ye'd be taking to this sphlindid waistcoat; that's all the fashion now, and it's well it 'id look on yer fine figger. And don't ye want nothing at all to wear? And shure ye wouldn't be afther goin' naked like an omaudhaun in the streets and havin' the people shoutin' after ye?"

"How much rent d'ye pay for this stall," said I to her, to get her off a topic by which she made her living.

"Is't the durty rint ye mane? Well, it's enouff for the ould hole. I pay sixpence a day in advance, and the devil resave the penny I've turned yet, this blessed mornin.

"Have you any one to support beside yourself?"

66

Well, indade, I have two childher, and its small comfort they are to me. One of thim, the eldest, is down wud scarlet favir, and the docthor says it tin to one if she'll ever recover." "You see sir," said the detective, "the people who rent stands from the men as own this place, they have to pay sixpence a day to 'old the stand. But those fellows as you see running around like lunatics, and a borin of every one, they pays two pence a day rents-cos why they 'ave no stands and honly walk habout with the clothes hon their harms."

"Yis, and I wish you'd sind them to the divil, the haythens -they niver give an honest woman a chance to make a penny be hook or be crook, wud thim runnin all over the fair."

"Halso, we never allows the 'awker as has no stands to stay in one place," said Dick Ralph, "cos hif we did, that would ruin the business of the people as pays rent for the stands. So we keeps them a movin' hon, and they doesn't like it, but we have got to do it, or else they would have rows hall the Sunday through with the nobs as keeps the stands. You see, the wery minute one of the 'awkers gets hopposite a stand, he collects a crowd and-now, there goes one now;" and he pointed to a fellow with a pair of trousers, who was bawling his goods out while a policeman had him by the neck shoving him along by main force.

"Oh, some of these lads are precious 'ard coves, I tell you, to manage. Some of them will fight and curse at you like as hif they wor made of brass. But we never talks long to them, 'cos hif we did Rag Fair would be too much for the force."

"How much a day do the hawkers make on an average ?" I asked Ralph.

"Well, I can't tell, because they are sich werry 'ardened liars. I axed one the werry last Sunday as I wos 'ere. Says I, ‘old Benjamin, how much do you take in on a day's work on a haverage?" "

"Oh! blesh your 'art," sez he, "some days I hash two pounds profit, and some days I makes a shillin' by 'ard vork."

"Now ye see," said Ralph, "I knew he was of gaffin me, for he was not worth two pounds, body and soul, and I don't suppose he never made more than half a crown in a day and do his best. Then Old Benjamin spends it hall in fish. The Jew peddlers here are wery fond of fish on Saturdays. They would go without a meal in three days to have a fresh mackerel on Sunday. And they are werry pertikler as to who kills the meat before they buys it."

Determining to make another attempt to see Petticoat Lane on a week day, I bade the polite policeman and the highly odorous quarter of the Old Clothes sellers, a very good day.

CHAPTER X.

FROM NEWGATE TO TYBURN.

ET us look at Newgate. This stern old pile of stones heaped upon stones, grey and grim, the burden of whose sighs afflict the weary skies above.

The strangest kind of a fascination hung over me as I looked at its Gate, cut in the deep wall like the entrance to a rocky cave. The spiked sill spoke of gibbets, the bars and locks and bolts of a felon gang, who dragged their blind life away, day following day, for them without hope, the outside world vacant, dumb and blank as the Ages, to their crime begotten souls, whose only music was the clank of fetters and the hoarse grating of iron hinges.

The building itself, covering half an acre, seemed sealed like a sepulchre. There was nothing to be gotten out of it, one way or the other. No one can have even looked at this terrible prison of Newgate without a shudder of despair for his kind.

Only on certain recurring Black Mondays did it yawn like a grave in the face of a great swearing mob, to put forth something into the open in the shadow of St. Sepulchre's, that was half dead; to take it back after an hour quite dead; and then it relapsed into its old, inscrutable dumbness.

Now Gate of Ivory, now Gate of Horn-now a porch above which might be inscribed the despairing legend of the Inferno, now a wicket at which the charitable might tap gently, fraught

with messages of mercy to the fallen creatures within-the portal of Newgate could assume chameleon hues, not always hopeless.

Next to the spikes of Newgate, the visitor must always mark for lasting remembrance, the stones of Newgate doorsteps. They are not perhaps more than eighty years old, but they look more worn than the jambs of Temple bar-more decayed than the wheel windows of the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey. They are ancient through use, and not through time.

The Hall of the Lost Footsteps at Versailles is but an empty name, but the millions of footsteps that have worn Newgate stones, must make it an abiding reality. Here have united all the crooked roads. Here have fallen the last steps on the stones of the ford of the Black River. Beyond the steps has loomed the City of Dis.

How many footsteps! how many!

Lord George Gordon, after the riots and burnings of 1780, wrecked and crazy, totters feebly up Newgate steps to die in the prison which his murderous associates had attempted to burn. Desperate Thistlewood, fresh from the loft in Cato street, where his fellow conspirators were dragged-reeking from the murder of Smithers, whose ghost followed him to the gallows, is brought here heavily chained from the Tower Dungeon, in which the ministry with frantic fear had at first immured him.

He and his gang will leave Newgate no more save by the Debtor's Door, where the Man in the Mask-one of the few unsolved mysteries of the Nineteenth century-will do his horrible office upon them and hold up to the populace-five severed heads, who at first shudder, but growing hardened by the dripping sight of blood, will cry as the clumsy butcher lets the last head fall

"Hallo, butter-fingers!"

Down Newgate steps at dead of night, how many corpses of uncoffined wretches have been borne in sacks, to be dissected at Old Surgeon's Hall, over the narrow causeway which skirts the prison.

EXECUTION OF BARRETT.

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No grapnel

The dread gaol keeps its secret better now. hauls forth the dishonored carcass of the dead criminal for ex

position at the Gemonian steps.

The place is doubly a Golgotha, and murder is buried on the spot where it has been slain.

Here died brave hearted Michael Barrett, the victim of the last public execution which will ever take place in Newgate, just three short years ago. How the huge metropolis seethed and boiled like a world-cauldron that day of days!

Condemned to die as a Fenian conspirator, he gave his life gallantly for his native land, and in his last hour frightened England more than a hundred living Barretts could have done.

I stood before Newgate with a member of the Old Jewry force who had seen the execution of Barrett. From the fact that the government, after that day, has prohibited any more public executions, his description of the scene will be worthy of recounting to my readers. The detective was a young man, and intelligent beyond his class. We were standing outside of the prison gate.

The lane or street of the Old Bailey, which begins at Ludgate Hill, one block below St. Paul's Cathedral, runs toward Newgate street, parallel with Giltspur street which it enters, and forms before ending a triangular space of about two acres square measurement. At the angle, formed by the Holborn Viaduct, which ends here, (Giltspur street and Newgate street,) is the old Church of St. Sepulchre. To the right and behind us, we could just trace the ornamented and beautiful facade of Christ Church Hospital. To our left and below us was the Sessions Court in the Old Bailey, a place in some respects like the Tombs Court and the Court of General Sessions. in New York, were both courts to be combined. I am thus particular in order to show my readers where and how Michael Barrett, the last Newgate victim, died.

"Well, you see, Sir," said my Old Jewry friend to me, the week as Barrett wos hung wos a busy week with us. Up all night sometimes and all day, searching the holes and corners